Thieves

No one talks enough about how mental illnesses are the thugs of medicine, the thieves that steal joy in broad daylight. A mental illness is the sign of a diseased organ, your brain. However, people do not see it that way. Most of the things that medicine calls “a symptom” a layperson would call a “moral failing.” So, not only do you feel bad about yourself, you have a lot of help in this area. May is mental health awareness month, so I’ve been trying my best to talk out what I’m going through; it may not help me, but it might help someone else who’s also in the trenches. It will help me if I go back and read it next year, or five years from now. My own entries don’t help me until I forget that I’m the one who wrote them. Emotional disconnection is key, because then I am not reliving entries.

The process now is how to see joy in the midst of all this anxiety? My last entry was absolutely a gutter snipe because my mind was in that place. It is not always. I had just been set off by many other things, and anger rises within me when I think about the situation I’m in now. Aada would say that’s all my fault, but all she ever offered me in return for my silence was more of the same. She’d like to keep writing to me. I would keep getting sicker while she ignored all the symptoms. I would keep getting sicker while she was allowed to live her life far and away from me, and I wasn’t interested in that. When she told me she’d lied about knowing Jonna and Tony Mendez, I couldn’t even bet that she wasn’t lying about that…. that she was actually telling the truth, she just had to have a story for my blog as to why I’m the one that wanted to “break up with her.” I wouldn’t have broken up with her for lying about anything. We weren’t together. I can take a whole bunch of shit from friends, but this was bigger than that.

She thought I wanted fame. She thought I wanted glory. It was realizing that all of my friends have been in this blog as themselves that made me realize that she wanted to be special. That she’d put me in a horrible situation on purpose and just said “figure it out.” Basically, are you going to be true to yourself or are you going to be true to me?

She’d not been true to me, so why should I return the favor? I wrote over and over about the simple things I wanted from her. Kahvi together and not a Starbucks gift card being the biggest, because that would have broken the spell. I thought she shit magic for 12 years. I am still not convinced she doesn’t, she just has a new mark. Because in the end, she stole my joy at being alive for quite some time. As she got stronger, I got weaker. I gave up power because I thought she needed it. Turns out, she did, because what she wanted was for me to stay quiet about everything I’d been through because someone might figure out that what I’d been through also involved her. As if.

It was selfish and self-absorbed to think she had the right to take away my story the longer time went on, because the more we talked, the more she inserted herself. Of course the story is going to involve her if she’s in my life to a bigger degree. She scared me. Flat out. From the very beginning, I pretended I was totally cool and over 12 years I stopped talking to anyone and everyone else. I moved to DC to isolate myself even more from Dana and my family, hoping that Aada would see that I was trying to make good on the promise of being the friend I said I would be… but she wouldn’t see me in person and I know why. I was completely smitten with her and she thought I couldn’t behave myself. She never gave me a chance to get closer or disconnect.

Because she had to have me on a string to keep our connection alive. What would I say if I was allowed to leave the island? She’s finding out now. I have a million emotions, and yet none of them are about care and connection with her. That time has passed.

“Do you remember telling your sister that your dad hurt your first girlfriend?” I remember telling her that I thought it was true because that idea had been planted. So had the idea that I ruined Aada’s sister’s state house run. So had the idea that Dana had been hurt because Aada’s sister’s husband hurt her when he found out that I was hitting on her (I can’t remember if I did or I didn’t. It was 12 years ago and all three of us were drunk). Everyone acts as if I made all of this up when I was told these things were true by someone in a position of authority to be able to research them.

I have no reason to distrust what Aada says about anything, until now. She said that she would never betray me, but so far all of the things that she used to get me into the hospital have turned out not to be true.

It’s payback for my betrayal, I’m sure. The one in which she said I’d never be able to hurt her with anything I did. I published the name she worked under before she retired, and it was a mistake because that’s the only thing in the e-mail that needed to be edited out, and I was so happy to get the e-mail in the first place that I did not proofread. ADHD gonna ADHD, but there’s no sympathy for that. There’s only rage. There’s only going walkabout while I try not to kill myself on the streets of Baltimore late at night.

Killing myself on the streets of Baltimore was going to be so easy. I’d just walk around until I got shot. I had no reason to live anymore, and moreover, I didn’t want to. Eventually, the cold convinced me that I should give it one more shot because the neighborhood around me was too nice. Last time this happened, I found a warehouse where everyone was doing crack and couldn’t OD. Apparently, my tolerance for crack is quite high the first time around, but I had a hell of a time coming down. So, I’ve never done it again. I knew I liked it too much, and that twice was a habit.

So this time, no drugs. Just exercise and hoping I’d walk into a situation and wouldn’t get out of it. The funniest thing happened, though. My endorphins kicked in and I started to want to live. Michael calls it “going walkabout,” how soldiers get through war. There was not this wild new joy at wanting to live. It was more like, “shit. My phone is dead and I have to walk all the way back to the emergency room so someone calls my sister.” I think they must have sedated me at that point, because who doesn’t get sedated when they’re talking about the subject matter I do?

Aada told me once that a man hit her and she fucked him up. I have never forgotten it…. that I never hit her, but this must be her way of fucking me up so that I never want to hear from her again. Believe me, it’s working and it isn’t.

We have both fucked each other up so that I think we could start on equal footing with mediation, but I would be surprised if she ever agreed to it. There’s no reason. She’s going to ride off into the sunset with her story intact, and mine is going to be fucked up because she made sure that it would be.

I still remember being excited that I was going to get to see Heytch after all these years, knowing it would be a serious discussion about boundaries and being willing to engage because I was so lonely, anyway.

I was ready to face the discordant music I’d made in other people’s lives because I was so worried about protecting Aada that I, again, shut down so far I couldn’t see anyone around me. I’m also autistic and miss social cues, which only made my life worse. I can’t apologize to everyone enough, so I just don’t. The people who aren’t tired of me will show up on their own.

But it won’t be Heytch, it won’t be Mummo, and it won’t be Aada. It won’t even be Dana and Counselor. If Dana is mad at me for my last e-mail and wants to stay that way, she can. But I told her that her sister was one of the people that helped put me in the hospital this time, and she was told her sister wasn’t there. I told her that because I was told her sister was there. It was just another way in which Aada played tricks with my mind.

I do mind Dana contacting anyone in my family but me, though. She didn’t reply to me. She forwarded the whole chain to my dad. I’m going to guess Aada told her to do that, too. And if she didn’t, it still sounds like something she would do, just to make me feel a little bit worse.

I noticed that she just said, “my sister’s part in all this,” though, so perhaps Dana knew more about what “this” was than I did.

The only conclusion I can come to is that Aada is such a miserable person that she wanted me to die, and I fucked her by not. She may not bow to my thu’um, but she will hear it.

Mental illness is the thief of joy, but you can do a lot with spite in its absence. I’m still alive, even when I don’t want to be. I’m still alive, even when my symptoms combine to make my life a living hell. The only way out is through, and this entry is a dragon roar. You don’t get to be a dragon until you can scream so loud they can hear you from California to Islamabad.

And that is what is happening, day by day. I have gone from sitting in my own misery, to taking back my power. It’s just problematic that Aada does not want me to have it, because she was happy keeping me in her little box of toys, the ones she never took off the shelf to see if they were wearing out.